Step 2. Wellness planning

Involving management and employees in your workplace wellness program is the key to your success. Including everyone when developing the program shows you value their opinions. This helps improve workplace relations and sparks interest in workplace wellness.

Wellness planning helps you consider:

how to structure your program

who should be involved and how to get them involved

what resources you require.

Set up a committee or identify wellness representatives

Establish a committee (or wellness representatives) to guide and lead your workplace wellness program. A committee can help involve employees and give them ownership.

Invite people to join the committee who have an interest in employee health (for example, human resources, workplace health and safety). Also, include employees from different areas and organisational levels. If you’re a small workplace, you may not need a committee. However, you should have at least one wellness representative to drive the program. It’s a good idea to have more than one person so that responsibility is shared. If you need outside help, you can engage an external wellness provider.

Make it easy for employees and management to provide ideas to your committee. Create a feedback process to encourage their input and add workplace wellness as a regular team meeting item. Use email, workshops or focus groups to help keep the wellness conversation going.

Wellness resourcing

Your wellness program needs sufficient resources to be a success. This means considering program budget, people resources and dedicating time.

If possible, secure a program budget and allocate work time so your committee (or representatives) can regularly get together. A wellness program doesn’t have to be costly, but it needs dedicated time and effort.

The success of your wellness program depends on employee involvement. One way to achieve this is to identify wellness champions.

Wellness champions are positive role models who inspire and motivate others to participate. They can be committee members or even the Chief Executive Officer.

Look for people with strong leadership skills and invite them to join the program. In time, some employees may emerge as champions through their leadership and participation.

Step 2. Checklist

Have you established a workplace wellness committee (or wellness representatives) to coordinate the program?

Does your committee include representation from participating worksites and business units?

Is workplace wellness a regular agenda item at team meetings?

Do you allocate work time for committee (or representatives) meetings?